Don't hold back Chris...

There seems to be a reasonable case to call some Creationists child-hating (kids are evil sinners by birth) but there are many very nice Creationists who don't deserve such a strong label.

Christianity is spiritual AIDS. So start thinking instead of believing, because "belief" is weakness, knowledge is power!!! Just google the word "belief"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief

I for one sill believe in unicorns, thank God, or the devil, or whoever runs this stinking hole of a place.

C'mon Chris, tell us how you really feel.

Will there ever be a cure for religion?

>> ^Trancecoach:
Will there ever be a cure for religion?


Hopefully science will stop 'figuring out stuff' real soon now, and if that happened somehow, no, the argument for bronze-age magical thinking wouldn't be undermined any more than it has been already.

Death is the cure for religion. We have to stop theists infecting the minds of our children, and the only way to do it is to wipe them out.

Science, education, an advancing culture, the advocacy of Dawkins and Hitchens - these won't redeem our enemies, just camouflage them.

Gorillaman, your comments seem counterproductive because they discredit every idea you espouse in connection to your calls for violence. What's so bad about Dawkins and Hitchens that you're trying to discredit them?

If you're going to make such bold claims, I think you have an intellectual responsibility to defend them.

If Dawkins and Hitchens achieve anything it's to confuse a few of the monsters into mindlessly adopting the correct position. No true human being needs atheism explained to them, we wouldn't even have a word for it if it wasn't for them - it's fundamentally obvious to anyone in possession of our unique and beautiful perception. How can we destroy our enemies if we can't tell who they are, because some idiot's taught them to put on a show of rationality?

A human being is a mind perfect in attitude, an acuity driven by reason. A theist is a black abyss of lies, tainting the animate corpse of the child it murdered. They're nothing but vapid parasites on our glory. Poisoned emptiness forced into the defenceless mind of a child, which becomes one of them and does the same thing to the next generation.

They're not us. They're not people. No amount of debate or cultural progress will eliminate the blight of the monsters among us. They can't be reasoned with, they can't be repaired or pacified, they have to be exterminated or they'll continue to inflict their disease on our world.

No, gorillaman. That is a horrible, horrible attitude to take. They are children. They have not allowed themselves to grow up to become rational adults, but they are not monsters. They are simply immature. Every human has the ability to throw off the shackles of delusion and join the ranks of the mature, rational beings. Please, please, stop dividing human beings into them and us. That is the kind of immorality preached by religion. As an enlightened being, you should know better; unless you are simply a fallen believer, clinging to another "faith system", ultimately destined to return to "the church".

And as for the usefulness of people like Dawkins and Hitchens, I called myself an agnostic before I read The God Delusion. Now I proudly call myself atheist, with the full knowledge of the internal contradictions that make faith-based beliefs untenable.

It may be fundamentally obvious to those of us who have rejected faith, but for years I was one of them. Please do not become the demon you think you are rejecting by seeming to advocate, or at the very least condone, some sort of violent cleansing. It must be done with peace and rationality, or we do not deserve it.

Ask yourself how twisted your mind would have to become before you started believing their bizarre and wild ideas with literally no logical or evidential basis. Ask yourself if you'd even still be you at that point.

It's a great source of consternation to me that I so often have to argue against my rationalist colleagues' irrational pacifism. The extermination of theists is a natural expression of our human right to self defence. They damage the world just by existing; they hold back our culture, they form insane and corrupt governments, they consume our resources and they attack our children.

We've already talked about the ethics, so I'll leave that alone in this comment. I think one of the things we're talking about is practicality. In a discussion we had a week ago you wrote:
>> ^gorillaman:
. . . How do you feel about the people who try to block the advances you're talking about? Outlaw the work that you believe will vastly improve (save?) the future of the human race? At least from a utilitarian perspective you must want to see them dead. How many people are they murdering, how much damage are they causing to how many trillions of human lives?

I missed your response at the time... my apologies for not responding.

~90% of the US are theists. If 90% of the US economy was cut down, that would be a cataclysm for humankind's scientific output. We would be able to kiss goodbye all the amazing milestones science will otherwise reach this century.

In practice, what would the elimination of other ideological segments of society look like? Small bombings that kill 0-50 individuals? That's not enough to have any social impact, and it would only help discredit anyone with similar views to the bomber. (e.g. the Unibomber helped discredit other people on the far-left who had anti-technology views).


I think rationalists tend to have it pretty good... being smarter than the rest of society isn't so bad. The general ineffectiveness of society doesn't bother me that much as long as I'm still able to personally benefit from my enhanced productivity in a reasonably-free market economy.

What about humankind's scientific output over the lifespan of the universe? I'm confident it wouldn't take that long for a fully secular society to exceed the potential of our current bog of confusion. We'll have to cut loose the deadweight eventually, and the longer we leave it the more damage they do.

What would killing 50 criminals achieve? Exactly that, it's an end in itself, but it doesn't have to be the only end. We could win a culture war if only we could agree that it needs to be fought.

It's true that a substantial degree of society's political physiology can't be changed via reasoned argumentation.

It is, though, inevitable that reprogenetics will change the fabric of society over the next several decades. People who oppose it now will embrace it once they see the children of early-adopters outperforming their own children. Society's intelligence problem (e.g. Palin) is a temporary phenomenon. Some theists will certainly never adapt, but they'll be marginalized the way the Amish have been.

The vast majority of rationalists (or people from any subculture) will always oppose violent solutions, and it seems to have less costs to just wait several decades for a a proactive solution that works for everybody than to resign oneself to a life of violence that has mediocre influence (much less influence than e.g. Hitchens writing a best-seller, which could outright convert tens of thousands of people).

That seems extremely optimistic, but I have to bow to your scientific knowledge. Let me know where I go wrong in the following.
What are you saying exactly, twenty/thirty years until parents can start selecting for intelligence? So then another twenty years until it sees any significant adoption, assuming it isn't criminalised, which it will be; a generation to see the results, which I guarantee will be obfuscated and difficult, and contested with at least the same vigour as the health effects of cigarettes; another generation or more for the populations most in need of improvement to be persuaded; then a generation for their children to mature. That's in the west and the best case scenario seems to be well over a hundred years before the average intelligence can be raised to, what, college graduate? And we all know college graduates can still be retards.
That's based on selection. People can only be made so much smarter without actually reengineering them, and who knows when that technology will mature given the complexity of intelligence and the problem of human testing.

Yes, application of what you're calling reprogenetics is inevitable and positive, and you're absolutely right that when sufficient genetic advancement is made, eventually theists will disappear on their own. I've expressed my mistrust of persuasion as a means for change, but no one can argue with genetics. What I don't see is a timescale anything like as short as you're describing. If it isn't, the further damage these people will do ranges from a technological deficit that will affect every human being who will ever live, to the extinction of our race.

It would be brief if only it wasn't *dead.

This published video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by radx.